Thanks to Monoscope for the recent link (and Coudal too). We're not really part of that whole putting-amazing-and-quirky-scans on the internet thing (mainly because other people do it so much better, e.g. Monoscope on Roy Doty'sSempe-like illustrations), but it's a shame not to upload something every now and again.

Is it really true that in the USA 'The government agents have decreed, in their egocentric wisdom, that no human can live in anything less than 900 square feet.'? From Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, an essay by Joel Salatin. The Parker Morris Committee recommended minimum dwelling sizes of 775 square feet, but that was for 'a semi-detached or end-of-terrace house for 4 people' / in other news, 'As an energy-saver, the clothesline makes a comeback', as American states seek to overturn community association bans on drying clothes out in the open air where people can see them (via Bouphonia)

The correlation between bonus money and house prices laid bare: 'Last autumn agents at Savills predicted that £5 billion of the £8 billion of bonus money would be ploughed into London property.' / re-live the yearning and excitement of days gone by with catalog scans from the past (via me-fi). Alternatively, create a fictional 1950s childhood for your own offspring with tasteful toys by Hase Weiss / making guitars look pre-distressed.

Building Towers, Cheating Workers, 'Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates'. The dark side of the UAE explored in a new(ish report. The region is topped by the Burj (official site, but this one, Burj Dubai Skyscraper, has ongoing construction photos and news). Related, Koolhaas speaks, and ponders nostalgia, paradox and his own role in rapid change. The article makes passing reference to his early career as a scriptwriter: check the IMDB. The cross-pollination of data sources; 'writer, actor, producer, self' is just as iconic title as S, M, L, XL. Koolhaas is, of course, heavily involved in the Eternally New Dubai. Culture, it seems, is an infinite commodity: 'We calculated that between 1995 and 2005, Oma was asked to propose designs for 34 soccer fields of new museums.'

Michael Cook, of Vanishing Point: 'We also don't give enough time or consideration to how this infrastructure fits into the broader urban fabric, within the history of a city, and where that city's going, and whose lives have been affected by it and whatever may happen to it in the future.' Cook is interviewed at length at BLDG BLOG. Cook worries that the mainstream media fails to cover urban and subterranean exploration in any depth (if you'll pardon the pun); the subject is more or less confined to the internet. The series of tubes metaphor we toyed with a few days ago has certainly confused some in the past, but we still think there are interesting analogies between real-world arcana and the mental perception of the internet's form.

A collection of architecture posters / OwenHatherley on the legacy of Richard Seidler, once the commercial colossus of London's skyline (a role he abrogated in death to Foster and Partners) / dovegreyreader, a book-weblog / 'So what is it that makes branding, advertising and public relations such attractive careers to even the reasonably intelligent?' Tom Coates muses on Monocle's obsession with 'place-branding at the country level', and how the 'industries of control and coercion' are beating the old-fashioned idea of actually making something tangible and real.

Why is there such a focus on the unexplained and the arcane on the internet? This post on Abandoned Tunnels & Vast Underground Spaces is a Dark Roasted Blend special mix, compiling some of the most memorable subterranean photo sets from around the world. Urban exploration, above and below ground, holds an eternal fascination, as the built environment succumbs to renewal and change. We'd speculate that the internet itself is perceived as a hybrid of the tunnel and archive, an underground repository that is all around us but simultaneously invisible. In his interview with the novelist Patrick McGrath, The possibility of secret passageways, Mr Manaugh speculates on what forms of architecture tap directly into our emotions and fears. This post was followed by one on the underground Turkish city of Derinkyu, a vast network of largely unmapped passageways and chambers beneath the modern city. This above and below status is what makes the internet simultaneously new and also reassuringly old, an alluring throwback to the mental image of the tunnels and systems that sustain us, revealing long lost knowledge to all, yet somehow preserving it as something that is available only to the lucky few.

'Other than browsing a bookstore's shelves, there’s probably nothing better for this bookophile than browsing publisher’s catalogs — if only the books themselves took up as little space,' notes Steven Heller in Confessions of a Book Catalog Reader over at Design Observer. Just lately we've taken to asking for pdfs of books and keeping those in lieu of the finished object; it certainly helps with storage problems.

The Aquarium ('purveyors of the finest and roughest in art and publishing') are promoting 'the idiocy of idears', a free book without 'ISBN, barcode or author'. To be distribute covertly: find 'under the Fiction, Poetry, Art, Philosophy and/or Travel sections in Central London bookshops from 10th August and other locations around the UK after that.' A combination of Steal this Book and BookCrossing.

London in Oblivion, Allen Varney in the Escapist magazine on the intersection of modelling, architecture and gaming, and why 'real architects laugh at game engines'. The piece revisits things favourites DigitalUrban, doing remarkable things with off-the-shelf gaming software and tools like SketchUp. According to Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith of Digital Urban, 'Every architect's office should have an Xbox 360 or PS3, if only to remind them of the level of graphics they should be aiming for.' (the relentless glossiness of contemporary visualisation makes us wonder whether there is an 'uncanny valley' for buildings).

And here we are again, see-sawing between producing long lists of ephemera, conjucture, opinions and collections, and then sitting back and thinking about what it all means. In all our years observing the evolution of the weblog, and the exponential growth in the amount of visual material that is being uploaded daily (like the steady rise in CC licensed imagery at flickr), it's rare that anyone actually stops to decode what it all means. Sure, there's an array of new and re-profiled words brought into currency to describe this new world - retroism, popist, neo-futurist, post ironic - but nothing is all encompassing enough to capture the

Barely a day goes by without us stumbling across another repository of wonders (Nouvelle Vague, Arkintia, Supercolossal, etc. etc.). Maybe not 'wonders', but _interesting things_. Stuff that makes you stop and look a bit closer, and maybe click through. Perhaps there's a problem. There's a point in Andrew Marr's excellent book My Trade where he observes, grumpily, that the modern newspaper, with all its supplements and sponsored sections and 'ten bests...' and shopping pages, exists solely to sell you things. The list format, which leaked into newspapers from the magazine trade, has proved the natural way of presenting information on the internet. Visual creatures that we are, it is the sites that spool off an array of delicious images, like a fresh layer in a chocolate box, that garner the most interest.

The danger is that architectural arcana or academic enquiry is relegated to the same level as the ongoing tidal wave of objects and flippant scans, that essays on urbanism are lumped with kitsch flickr sets or scanned scrapbooks. Everything is flattened down to the same level, attention spans are eroded and nothing very much ends up being done. Instead, all that's observed is the accelerating pace of creative activity. Objects, places, things, memes, everything boils down to data points on a graph, the decanting of shifting opinion into easily digestible forms.

David Byrne on people who live in glass houses; a life lived meticulously: 'one very considered vast modernist artwork, or stage set, as if to say that modernism doesn’t stop at the door of the museum or at a building’s edge. It’s a way of remaking the world.' Our Glass House post from a few weeks back.

Jenny Turner's article In search of lost time is a tour-de-force exploration of one particular manifestation of contemporary nostalgia, the 'boys' book', epitomised by the best-selling The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden (a book so steeped in the past that even its website is an adept mock-up of a gilded and embossed tome) and now the The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls (which apparently doesn't deserve a website. Never mind: John Crace digested it quite succinctly in July). Turner adeptly demonstrates how nostalgia skips around decades, swathing each era in a cotton wool romance of objects and events, taking in E Nesbit, Proust, Fat Owls, Boden kids, David Foster Wallace and Penguin's skillful re-packaging of tales of derring-do into 'Boys Own'-style covers along the way. She also demonstrates a perfect understanding that the 'gust of joy' of nostalgia (literally the 'pain of return') is all quite real, essentially unquantifiable but ultimately personal, and not for sale. The tragedy is, nostalgia has been commoditised to the point of no return, as these books demonstrate. Turner's piece on office life is worth reading, too, as is her first novel, The Brainstorm.

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The Prefab Fad, 'Prefabrication is everywhere in American home-building. But that doesn't mean your next house is going to be a stylish, Modernist box.' Witold Rybczynski on the missed opportunity of mass-produced housing, featuring, in what must a first for architectural journalism, one of Mr R's own projects to kick off the slide show / Touch the sky, Edwin Heathcote on high-rise living. Amazingly, St George's Wharf in Vauxhall gets yet another kicking. Is there no end to this building's ignominy?

Dyckhoff draws up a list of Britain's ugliest buildings in The Times, a popular pastime in this day and age, which says something about the perceived quality - or lack of quality - of contemporary architecture / container cranes made by ZPMC, the Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Company. Something you own has probably been lifted by a ZPMC crane at some point in its life / Atlas(t) has evolved into what it's calling 'The Galleon Trade Edition', 'embedded reportage' from Galleon Trade, 'a series of international arts exchange projects, focusing on the Philippines, Mexico, and California'. Posts tackle issues like the cultural equalisation resulting from pirate DVDs.